Mondi packaging helps lower Finnish coffee brand’s carbon footprint

From: Packaging News

Mondi has supplied renewable packaging material for Paulig Coffee packs, helping it lower carbon footprint.

Paulig Coffee is one of the market leading coffee manufacturers in Finland, the Baltics, and Russia.

The brand has committed to reduce its carbon emissions by 40% by 2020, and looked at vasrious areas such as emissions and packaging.

The Finnish company worked with Mondi to find a packaging material with a lower carbon footprint.

The majority of Paulig’s Mundo brand of aromatic, Fair Trade and Organic certified coffee’s packaging is made from laminates that contain layers of oriented polyamide (OPA), aluminium and polyethylene (PE), which form a crucial barrier against oxygen and light.

In the last five years, Paulig managed to reduce laminate thickness by 10% per packaged kilogramme.

The objective is to replace all fossil fuel-based materials, including conventional PE, with renewable alternatives for Paulig‘s coffee packaging by 2025.

Kati Randell, senior manager for strategic packaging development at Paulig, said: “In the last five years, we managed to reduce laminate thickness by 10% per packaged kilogramme, without compromising on vital product protection. But we wanted to take our commitment to sustainability even further.”

Mondi suggested an alternative, bio-based PE material – made from sugarcane. The new laminate consists of a mix of standard PE and sugarcane-based PE, which provides the necessary peelability for easy opening.

Ultimately, this reduces the amount of fossil fuel used. In the future, Paulig aims to use even more bio-based PE in the coffee packaging.

Christian Höglund, business development manager at Mondi Consumer Goods Packaging, added: “When Paulig reached out to us, we had actually just completed the development of our bio-based laminate, among other sustainability projects. The timing was perfect – we simply needed to find out if the laminate was suitable for coffee applications. The production trials on Paulig’s vacuum pack machines went smoothly and worked well with their existing production and set-up,” Christian Höglund recounts. With sealing temperatures and sealing times comparable to standard PE laminates, the bio-based alternative is considered a success in terms of its technical applicability.

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